Bulletin E-Edition:
Look now for swifts – they’re quick
By Kate Ramsayer / The Bulletin
Published: May 01. 2009 4:00AM PST
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Two Vaux’s swifts fly out of the Christmas Presence chimney in downtown Bend. When the birds fly north in the spring, flocks roost in the chimney .
Andy Tullis / The Bulletin
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For the past several years, the chimney of the Christmas Presence store in downtown Bend has played host to hundreds of spring and fall visitors. Vaux’s swifts, small birds about 5 inches long, swirl down in the old chimney, where they’ll roost for a couple of nights after spending their days snapping up insects.
“The swifts are migrating through town, and they come and they stay in some of the old chimneys in downtown,” said Auni Miller, the owner of Christmas Presence on Harriman Street.
This year, they showed up earlier this week — and birders are asking residents to report roosting sites and swift numbers.
“It’s to get a handle on numbers,” said Nicole Nielsen-Pincus, a board member of the East Cascade Bird Conservancy, who is recruiting volunteer bird-counters in Oregon. “During migration, if we all pick one day to count, we can look at a trend over time.”
On Saturday, people along the swift’s migration route, which stretches from Central America to southern Alaska, will watch to see how many birds come to roost, she said.
Organizers “thought it would be pretty cool to link the whole migration corridor,” Nielsen-Pincus said.
And birders are curious about how the swift is faring these days since some of its preferred stopover sites are disappearing, said Tom Crabtree, also an East Cascade Bird Conservancy board member.
“Back in presettlement times, they’d find big, old trees that had been hollowed out, hit by lightning strikes, and perch in them,” Crabtree said. “But we don’t let those sit around anymore.”
Swifts, which roost upside down by grasping small ledges with their feet, adapted and started overnighting in brick chimneys. But now, that option is shrinking as well.
“As we’re getting more modern, we block off the chimneys and put grates over them, and (swifts) don’t have a place to go and roost,” Crabtree said.
Swifts previously roosted in several places in Bend, including the Reid School building, the Old Mill smokestacks and the Kenwood school building, but in at least one case, the chimney was capped.
“If people do have big, old chimneys, (they should) think about it before they cap them,” Crabtree said. “This is where (swifts) spend time in their migration, coming and going, and if there aren’t any chimneys left, the birds will go elsewhere or ultimately not survive because they don’t have a natural place to go.”
Swifts don’t seem to be declining in significant numbers, he said, but that’s one reason why birders are interested in the surveys.
The only Central Oregon spot Crabtree knows of where hundreds of birds roost is the Christmas Presence store, he said, but the birding group is looking for other sites, going out at dusk to search for areas with a large number of swifts and watching which direction they travel.
The birds are easy to distinguish when they’re in town, he said.
“They’ve been described, aptly, as a cigar with wings,” Crabtree said. “And they literally spend all day on the wing, catching bugs from the time they leave the chimney to the time they enter the chimney again at night.”
And when they return at night, they funnel into chimneys all at once.
“It’s like a huge tornado, that just swirls around and ends up going in,” Crabtree said.
In places like Portland or Eugene, where thousands of birds flock together at dusk instead of the couple hundred in Bend, the swift migration becomes something of a community event at times, Nielsen-Pincus said.
“People come and set up lawn chairs,” she said.
Kate Ramsayer can be reached at 541-617-7811 or at kramsayer@bendbulletin.com.
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